Radiohead is a british alternative rock band with the reputation of most of their music being sad, depressive and overall not approachable. You basically have to make a deep dive and become a hardcore fan to like their material. But I don't think it's true - I like a lot of their material, but don't enjoy or don't care for a lot of the rest of it. I want to take you along and highlight a bunch of songs that even non-Radiohead-fans can enjoy.

You'll go to hell
For what your dirty mind is thinking

Disclaimer

As written above, I wouldn't consider myself a "fan", I haven't even listened to all of Radiohead's albums - and that's ok! It should be obvious that this blog post is not en exhaustive list and purely my own opinion.

About the band

Radiohead formed in 1985 and consist of five memebers:

• Thom Yorke - vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards
• Jonny Greenwood - guitar, keyboards, lemon
• Colin Greenwood - bass
• Ed O'Brien - guitar, all the effects, backing vocals
• Philip Selway - drums

Some fun facts from interviews, forums or Reddit

• Thom Yorke seems to be responsible for most of the writing. According to some interviews, the hardest thing for the rest of the band when recording in the studio, is to not make the full band version sound worse than Thom's solo demos.
• Some songs take years from their first live performance to their release on an album - e.g., True Love Waits was performed for the first time in 1995 and was released in 2016.
• Many songs feature strange, spacy or otherworldly sounds. A lot of time when you ask yourself "what made this strange sound", it probably is Ed on his guitar and his huge array of guitar effect pedals.
• Jonny and Collin are bothers and it took me multiple years and a video pointing it out to realize it.

We hope that you choke, that you choke

Albums

Let's have a look at Radiohead's discography through my eyes - here we go!

Pablo Honey (1993)

I, like the rest of the world, know one song of this album - Creep. I don't know any other songs, so let's talk about this one:

• Creep (YouTube, Spotify): The song that makes a bunch of people think of Radiohead as a one hit wonder - it catapulted the band to way more fame than they were comfortable with. And, apparently, the band doesn't like this song very much nowadays...
  Overall it is a really great glam-rock(?) ballade with some harsh distorted guitars in the chorus and some nice falsetto vocals in the bridge. The biggest "problem" with it is that the rest of Radiohead's repertoire (at least starting 1997) doesn't sound anything like this.

Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You're so fuckin' special
I wish I was special

The Bends (1995)

I don't know one song of the album. Next!

OK Computer (1997)

This is it. This is The Album, the one that cemented Radiohead as The Gods Of Alternative Rock. If you want to give exactly one Radiohead album a go, this one should be it. It's the most popular Radiohead album on Spotify and its songs occupy spot 2 and 3 on the band's most streamed list (No Surprises and Karma Police). Let's have a look at my favourite songs:

• Paranoid Android (YouTube, Spotify): What should you do if you have ideas for three different songs, but cannot figure out where to go with them? If you ask Radiohead: smush them together, add some lines in 7/8 for good measure and quote a depressed android from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The result is an over 6min long hit single, often compared to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. While I'm not 100% sold on the electric guitar solo parts, they tie the other parts of the song together, and those are exquisite. Also, the lyrics are so immensely quotable, I was considering only using quotes from this song in this blog post. As a whole, I consider Paranoid Android to be a masterpiece. Not a fan of the music video, though.
• Exit Music (For A Film) (YouTube, Spotify): Spoiler: it is the credits song for the 1995 movie Romeo and Juliet and the lyrics kind of work as the summary of the plot. It starts with acoustic guitar accompanying sparse vocals in the verse, then adds a mellotron choir in the chorus, then goes back to the verse, with some sound effects and ambient noise added. Did you like the chorus? Then tough luck, because we are going to The Bridge, with the fuzzieset bass guitar you'll ever hear in a ballade, then directly to the outro. Some dislike the juxtaposition between the in-your-face fuzz and the rest of the song, for me this is what make Exit Music so special.
• Climbing Up the Walls (YouTube, Spotify): A horror movie from the view of the bad guy, in song form. How can soft falsetto singing and an acoustic guitar sound so creepy? Microtonal strings, strange sound effects, creepy and distorted vocals (and lyrics), primal screams recorded through guitar pickups - this song has it all. The atmosphere is just great, and this is one of my favourite songs overall.

When I am king you will be first against the wall

Kid A (2000)

Most of the album is basically Radiohead is experimenting with electronic music. And the experiment mostly worked out very well, you just have to adapt your expectations - most of the songs are somewhere between "interesting" and "excellent" with one or two misses, it's just not Ok Computer, but it's still Radiohead. The most tragic thing about the album is that the title track, Kid A, is the worst song on it - at least in my opinion.
The standout songs for me:

• Everything In Its Right Place (YouTube, Spotify): The best opener of a Radiohead album (1/3). Electric piano based, with a time signature that both feels a bit familiar and a bit alien (I feel it in 10/4), nice vocals and a lot of highly processed vocal samples. Hard to describe, just a great and very chill song overall.
• Idioteque (YouTube, Spotify): Very experimental, could be playing on a rave. Very different from what you would expect from Radiohead - electric drums with some sparse chords on top, multi-harmony vocals and a lot of glitchy sound effects. The bridge/outro/whatever could be a bit shorter to my tastes, but other than that - awesome song.
• Motion Picture Soundtrack (YouTube, Spotify): A hard hitting, deeply melancholic track about regrets, self-doubts and uncertainties about the future. The main spotlight, next to the vocals, is taken by the harmonium pedal organ (think accordion but in piano size). The song ends with choir and harp sounds and evokes the feeling of a movie soundtrack.

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Amnesiac (2001)

The material for this album was recorded in the same sessions that Kid A was. I'm not a huge fan of a bunch of tracks on it - they feel more like auditory experiments than what I would call "songs". Here are some of the ones I enjoy:

• Pyramid Song (YouTube, Spotify): Very different from the rest of the album. Piano, lush strings, beautiful vocals and a confusing pulse (but if you break it down enough, it's "just 4/4"). Put this song on, close your eyes and enjoy an almost 5min vacation from your day. Truly beautiful.
• Knives Out (YouTube, Spotify): A song with a strange atmosphere and lyrics about cannibalism(?). I really like the vocal melody and the chord progression.
• Life In a Glasshouse (YouTube, Spotify): This is another very odd one (for Radiohead): a jazz song featuring the Humphrey Lyttelton Band. It sounds very bluesy, sombre and raw. I love it.

If you'd been a dog
They would have drowned you at birth

Hail to the Thief (2003)

I would describe this album as a fusion of Ok Computer's alternative rock and the last two albums' experiments with electronic music. There are a lof of great songs on it, here are my favourites:

• 2 + 2 = 5 (YouTube, Spotify): The best album opener, period (2/3). Who needs verse, chorus or bridge - it's just three sections. The first is quite mellow, in 7/8 (because why not) and features unusual vocal harmonies, clean guitar arpeggios and a drum machine. Then the song erupts into its rock part and you can listen for about half a minute how Thom Yorke accuses you of "not paying attention". The last part is still upbeat, but a little less aggressive than the second and brings some more variety in lyrics and instruments used. I don't love parts 2 and 3 as much as the first one, but the song only works as a whole - and is just awesome.
• Where I End and You Begin (YouTube, Spotify): Frantic drums and bass lines paired with calm synths and vocals. Meaning-heavy lyrics that could be understood in a lot of ways (looking at interpretations online they fall somewhere between lamenting a breakup and looking down at earth front God's perspective). This song is making me feel the feels and it's quite hard to describe why.
• Myxomatosis (YouTube, Spotify): Trigger warning: myxomatosis is the name of a very ugly and usually deadly sickness that rabbits can get - don't google it if you are not prepared to see sick, swollen or mutilated pets.
  Prepare to get your face melted off. Fuzz guitar, distorted bass, dark synths, all playing the same riff in unison, non-flashy but uber-precise and machine-like drums, topped off by Thom Yorke singing in his lower register for once. This song should be a genre and there should be multiple bands just dedicated to this genre. Turn the volume to eleven, because if you don't introduce your neighbours to one of the best and the most aggressive Radiohead song, who will?

You can scream and you can shout
It is too late now
Because
You have not been
Paying attention

In Rainbows (2007)

• Nude (YouTube, Spotify): Don't get any big ideas, they're not gonna happen - This is the depressing Radiohead your friends and family warned you about. Deeply introspective and bleak lyrics are paired with a beautiful instrumentation and vocals. The song starts with a bass guitar playing in the upper register over smooth drums, then one after one vocals, guitar arpeggios and a string quartet comes in. The second half of the song has no lyrics but features Thom Yorke's humming accompanied by the rest of the instruments. The juxtaposition between "Dont get any big ideas, the're not gonna happen" and the beauty of the music feels like the message might be sometimes it's ok to no be ok.
• Weird Fishes/Arpeggi (YouTube, Spotify): This song delivers very well on its title: The lyrics talk about being eaten by weird fishes in an ocean - which are all metaphors, of course. I interpret them as being pulled down by anxiety or depression and dealing with all the intrusive thoughts nagging on you. The end lyrics I hit the bottom and escaped are pretty uplifting for a Radiohead song.
  And also you get all the arpeggi. There are three guitars playing different arpeggios of the underlying chords with different shapes, different accents and different meters. It's a very nice musical way of representing ocean waves that phase in and out and overlap each other. Next to "Creep", this is maybe the easiest Radiohead song to recommend - it is very complex but sounds very approachable and highlights the mastery of pretty much every member of the band.
• All I Need (YouTube, Spotify): A soothing, lullaby-like song featuring smooth e-bow parts, glockenspiel and heavily distorted bass guitar. The lyrics, at least the way I interpret them, are about a co-dependent relationship. The structure is quite straight forward with verse - chorus - verse - chorus, where each section plays with the dynamics, adding a layer or instrument each, until the last chorus suddenly strips everything down back to just drums, bass and vocals. Then, for a subtle outro, the song picks up pace again and errupts in a piano based crescendo with the lyrics alternating between It's all wrong and It's all right. Overall an unusual and very beautiful song.
• Jigsaw Falling Into Place (YouTube, Spotify): A frantic, acoustic guitar-driven song about Thom Yorke's dislike for dancing in a club (only slightly paraphrasing here). It starts quite stripped back, with vocals in the lower range, then builds and builds and builds, becoming more and more frantic by adding different instrument lines. A sudden switch to the higher register in the vocals at exactly the right spot catapults Jigsaw from "good" to "great", it's just a very enjoyable song overall and it's almost impossible to sit still while it is running.

I am a moth who just wants to share your light
I'm just an insect trying to get out of the night

The King of Limbs (2011)

This is probably the most divisive album amongst Radiohead fans. The whole album has a very experimental premise: every song started out as a loop that one of the band members made that then got turned into a full song. I quite like two songs, but not the album versions.

• Bloom (YouTube, Spotify): A super complex, frantic and bewildering peace about... the ocean? Performing it required Radiohead to hire a second drummer and, also, to put the guitar god Jonny Greenwood on a third, slightly smaller, set of drums. Bloom walks along the edge between music and chaos (sometimes embracing the chaos) and... is definitely one of the songs Radiohead recorded. I wouldn't be writing about it if not for a very different version: Thom Yorke's solo performance Live from Electric Lady Studios just with a piano and... some... reverb machine?... shows Bloom in a very different light. It also was the base/inspiration for Ocean Bloom, the main title track of BBC's Blue Planet II, a collaboration between Radiohead and Hans Zimmer.

• Give Up The Ghost (YouTube, Spotify): One of the most beautiful Radiohead songs, at least in my opinion. Acoustic guitar, very light drum machine, a vocal loop and Thom Yorke's beautiful singing. I love the "live from the basement" version, linked below.

  Please tell me that sounded alright

A Moon Shaped Pool

An overall loved album by the fans and a great return to form for those who hated The King of Limbs. I... like two songs:

• Burn the Witch (YouTube, Spotify): Best album opener (3/3) - nice and sweet vocals, paired with dark lyrics and dissonant strings. This is one of the songs I wouldn't mind listening to on repeat. The stop motion music video in the style of a preschool children's series about visiting a cult-run village is really awesome.
• Ful Stop (YouTube, Spotify): No, It's not a typo. The song starts as a dark techno track with some spoken lines in 6/4 (at least that's how I feel it), then opens up and adds real drums, light guitars and vocals. There is multimeter, interesting harmonies and different parallel vocal lines. Not a lot of lyrics but a lot of atmosphere.

Truth will mess you up

That's all!

I hope you enjoyed the small (incomplete and 100% subjective) glimpse at Radiohead's discography. If anything sounded interesting to you, just give the song a go - you don't have to be depressed or a super fan to enjoy a bit of Radiohead!